Mobility, Transnationalism and Contemporary African Societies. Edited by Tilo Gratz. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.  

BOOK REVIEW

Mobility, Transnationalism and Contemporary African Societies Tilo Gratz (ed.)  

Calvin Walds Syracuse University Department  of  African-­‐American  Studies      

(Un-)Boundedness: On Mobility and Belonging Issue 2 – March 2014 | www.diffractions.net

 

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When I arrived in Accra, Ghana, in June 2013, I was quickly attuned to the

omnipresence of mobility. Movement in all forms, in all directions, and at all speeds

surrounded me as I headed toward Kasoa, the community I would be living in one

hour outside of Accra. The constant presence of mobility in Ghana is reflective of the

manifold changes — political, economic, social, cultural, and geographic — occurring

across the African continent. African mobility is complex, operating across different

scales and actors moving in multiple directions, within nations, across nations and

oceans for different reasons. The book Mobility, Transnationalism and

Contemporary African Societies, edited by Tilo Gratz, informatively explores the

complexities of mainly voluntary African migration as a “particular form of mobility”

(1) in a variety of contexts — translocal rural-urban to transnational south-south and

international south-north migrations — which contribute to the creation of “supra-

regional social, political, and economic connections” (1). Implicitly and explicitly,

these connections work against state and international policies that obstruct

movement or expel migrants while also integrating Africans into the world economy

“from below” in informal, even clandestine spaces and modalities beyond what is

sanctioned by dominant sociopolitical institutions.

The contributors to the book address the “political and cultural dimensions of

migratory linkages,” that is, the “combination of interests and motivations,” with a

focus on “issues of citizenship, ethnicity, religiosity, and economy” (2). This advances

the conversations on African migration by focusing on the “new livelihoods, social

and religious practices and lifestyles created by migrants” (2). Illuminating the flux,

ambivalences, and oscillations of migrants who are often “simultaneously

incorporated in various societies, moving between moral fields as well as spheres of

exchange” (2) enlivens previously static or localized concepts and assumptions

regarding the identities and social and ethnic figurations of African societies. In

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noting this, the book draws off Nina Glick-Schiller’s work on transborder citizens1.

These citizens are individuals who may not have legal rights in more than one

country, but who may claim social or cultural citizenship in more than one.

Transborder citizenship goes beyond the legal and juridical definition of citizenship,

creating not only an expression of identity that crosses borders, but transnational

spaces in which one can exist and pursue modes of socialization and relationships

beyond the territory of nation-states.

Nina Glick-Schiller notes, in her chapter “Transborder Citizenship: An

Outcome of Legal Pluralism within Transnational Social Fields”, that to study

transnational processes is to “enter a domain in which crucial elements of social,

economic, cultural and political life take place across borders but in which nation-

states and their borders influence and shape such movements” (32). In an important

move, many contributors to Gratz’s book, including Ines Kohl, Nadine Sieveking, and

Paulo Gaibazzi, among others, emphasize the agency and efficacy of migrants in

negotiating transnational domains, which may entail a liminal or marginal living

situation due to xenophobia and racism.2 In practices that differ according to the

geopolitical and cultural context of migration, migrants have undertaken particular

strategies. These strategies include “developing new identities,” creating “their own

infrastructures, such as bars, workshops, teleshops” (e.g. Sebastien Lo Sardo’s

article), or using religious networks as a “social anchorage” that aids in “both the

adaptation of migrants into host societies and guarantee[s] the maintenance of

strong links to their countries of origin” (e.g., Michaela Pelican, Ekaterina

Shakhbazyan’s articles) (4). Such insights make the book an important read for

                                                                                                               1 Glick-Schiller, N. 2005. Transborder Citizenship: An Outcome of Legal Pluralism within Transnational Social Fields. In: Benda-Beckmann, F. V., Benda-Beckmann, K. V. and Griffiths, A. eds. Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World. England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pp. 27-50. 2 As exemplified by the recent protests and resistance efforts of African migrants to Israel in the face of xenophobic and anti-African fear and violence, a phenomenon not discussed in the book, but pertinent to a discussion regarding African mobility.

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anyone interested in the relationship between transnational migration and the nexus

of culture, social life and identity, and politics.

The ten articles that compose the book are organized thematically into three

sections: ‘Mobility and Modes of Flexible Adaptation,’ ‘Effects and Limits of

Migration,’ and ‘Transnationalism and Borderline Strategies’. The book’s

geographical purview includes a range of regions and countries throughout the

African continent as the articles work on a variety of scales, from a localized analysis

of specific ethnic groups to a nationwide and regional lens. This review will move

between the three major thematic points of the text through a brief discussion of each

of the articles.

Tilo Gratz’s article concerns miners and taxi drivers in Benin, migrants

seeking short-term economic opportunities (27). In Benin, mining and taxi-driving

are systems of labor organization that migrants can relatively easily enter and

gradually integrate into full employment, which can provide the means to “stabilize

their situation” (26-7). This ability to achieve stability through an informal enterprise

connects to Gratz’s larger point: even though gold mining and motor taxi driving are

“marked by the influx of numerous income-seeking migrants” (29), this does not

mean these enterprises are “incompatible with a high degree of normativity” (29).

Further, the presence of multiple ethnicities working together within these

enterprises results in an “open informal network of co-workers evolving beyond

ethnic ties” despite ethnicity remaining “pertinent to many other sectors of public life

and economy” (29).

Such complexities are also evident in Sebastien Lo Sardo’s article in which

there is an interesting negotiation of presence and absence, materialities and

immaterialities in his discussion of Hausa migrants in Belgium and Urban Niger. The

flows of materialities, such as “money, media, and various […] goods, [which]

circulate through the same channels” (34, 40). This occurs alongside the movement

of people working to produce connections between formerly disparate “urban and

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rural” spaces that are now “…filled with material, visual and discursive fragments of

distant elsewheres” (34), changing how either space is viewed outside the other. The

flowing materialities also come to stand in for and fulfill the social obligations of the

people who have migrated elsewhere, producing presence amid human bodily

absence. Migrants negotiate space in Belgium, where they forge transnational

circulations and seek out ethnic migrant communities. The migrants’

conceptualization of both their home cities and villages and the place of migration is

partly based upon how their lives are confined to a “few streets of southern Brussels”

(40), which misconstrues the sense of public space and limits social interaction.

Migrants, then, occupy a space of geopolitical ambivalence, an in-between state that

is “neither in Belgium nor in Niger but in the very channels connecting them” (40).

Thus, for those thinking about the contemporary global flow of capital and

materialities, it is important to remember the human beings who may live within this

flow, residing neither here nor there, live in the non-spaces in-between.

Shifting to the relationship between religious institutions and migration,

Ekaterina Shakhbazyan’s article on “Africans in Moscow” explores religion as one of

the primary “mechanisms of migrants’ … adaptation to and socialization in a new

environment and [for also] maintaining links with native cultures and home

countries” (45). Despite contemporary discussions of the increased secularization of

human life, religious institutions still fulfill various social, cultural, and political

functions. For migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa living in Moscow, “religious life is

not separated from other parts of their life but is interlocked and overlaps with them”

(45).

For scholars and students interested in societies that emerge from histories of

enslavement and colonialism, Olivier Leservoisier’s article focuses on the Haalpulaar

society in Mauritania, a place in which slavery is still a topical issue as the “groups of

servile origin are still facing various forms of discrimination… [and are the object of]

more and more frequent social conflicts” (59). The groups of servile origin face

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matrimonial and religious discrimination and being stereotyped. Additionally, they

face contestations over land tenure control. Migrants’ agentic roles play a significant

role in the emergence of new legitimacies as different political and economic changes

occur, including “migrant associations [contributing] to introducing new principles

for the management of local affairs which can result in certain people of subordinated

status playing a political role” (64). International migrants influence local politics by

both supporting “the political goals of social movements” and “introducing new ideas

and strategies” (68). These ideas, such as equality, dignity, and individuals skills,

then influence and motivate local migrant communities.

Departing one’s home country is often an unfulfilled aspiration for individuals

stuck in a state of immobility, as discussed in Ricacardo Ciavolella’s article on the

relationship between the FulaaBe, a pastoral Fulani group, and the State in the

southern-central region of Mauritania. For the FulaaBe, new forms of mobility are

not a success but a “strategy for survival” for coping with “dramatic living conditions”

(83). This forces one to recognize how the forms and experiences of mobility

transmute unevenly in different geopolitical contexts. The translocal spaces that the

FulaaBe communities live in are not “contexts of large and powerful transnational or

translocal networks” (83). A paradoxical aspect of the entrenchment of autochthony

is that it calls for excluding ‘strangers’ while stressing the importance of local

belonging. Local political elites are simultaneously benefitting from translocal

connections and resources coming from supra-local national and international

contexts, such as remittances, NGOs, and investments from development agencies.

The contemporary marginality of Mauritanian FulaaBe shows that “contemporary

translocality and new forms of mobility are only partially linked to African ‘cultures

of migration’ and depend on the logic of inclusion and exclusion to formal and

substantial citizenship” (87).

Paolo Gaibazzi’s article, “‘I’m nerves!’: Struggling with Immobility in a Soninke

Village (The Gambia),” speaks to the aspirations and frustrations of African youth as

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they negotiate a neoliberal world composed of flows and linkages. These unevenly

produce states of immobility for certain groups of people, especially those who reside

in the Global South. The amplified desire to move is contradicted by an increase in

blockages that prevent passages across borders, such as “policies and border

enforcement [that] leave narrow opportunities to travel to Europe, America, and

other destinations like Angola” (131). Having nerves is a desire to migrate from

Gambia, particularly to the West, which is seen as a place of opportunity to employ

one’s ambitions. Being stuck in a state of immobility in one’s home village can be

difficult as the conditions there grow increasingly dire as part of socioeconomic

difficulties connected to the larger global political economy. For the Soninke youth,

the materialities and places of the West seem to shimmer as they represent novelty

and modernity; the names of local communities and social groups take on the names

of the West, as emblematized by one Soninke ghetto being named Los Angeles.

Migration came to be integrated with one’s social worth and ambition. In turn, this

produces contemporary subjects in Africa who are at once dealing with transnational

pressures and expectations from the position of a local environment.

There are multiple ways one can react to the portrait of life sketched by

Gaibazzi, and other authors in the book. Is the drive to move an extension of the

human condition, the desire to create one’s own life in the act of movement, or are

these nerves a symptom of globalizing, neoliberal capital flows that seemingly force

individuals around the world to move? The ambitions of these Gambian youth are

akin to the ambitions of young people around the world who not only want to provide

for their families and communities, but also want to begin envisioning and creating a

world of connections, not boundaries. They want to begin envisioning and creating a

world of complexities and perspectives that extends beyond the conceptual and

political limitations of the still-lingering colonial and imperial ideas that created

contemporary global socioeconomic stratification.

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Ines Kohl’s article titled “Saharan “Borderline”-Strategies: Tuareg

Transnational Mobility” explores the transnational mobility of Ishumar, a group of

the Tuareg pastoral society. This transnational mobility is a relatively recent

phenomenon provoked by climatic, political, economic, and cultural changes in

which (ex)nomads move within and without the borders of Mali, Niger, Algeria, and

Libya. Such mobility can be seen as clandestine as many move without papers,

passports, or identity cards. It can also be seen as cosmopolitan as “they see, hear,

know, and understand more than their nomadic counters who just move in cycles in

their relatively bounded territory” (99). The Ishumar movement has origins in

postcolonial arrangements in the nation states connected to Tuareg, including Niger,

Burkina Faso, Algeria, and Libya. This has led to a decrease in the Tuareg’s

traditional nomadic way of life in addition to making life in the Sahara unstable and

risky. The Ishumar movement ”have become crucial to a form of Tuareg youth

culture and constitute a certain initiation rite…” (94).

Just as the Ishumar movement can “go in all directions” (94), it also moves

between conceptual categories as it is predicted on the specific situation of the

individual in movement. Thus, some who undertake it can be described as seasonal

workers, others as political or economic refugees. This evasion of easy categorization

is an important point as Kohl emphasizes that the terms refugee or migrant cannot

fully account for the consistent movement of the Ishumar, writing that “their mobility

can be described as partly cyclical, partly situational, sometimes seasonal, sometimes

permanent, but always irregular” (96). The Ishumar are not just passengers in

‘transnational illegal movements’ but agents, employing borderline strategies — e.g.,

desert knowledge, kinship affiliations, and multiple national identities — in

organizing and delivering the transportation of passengers and goods through the

Sahara desert (100). This agency underpins the mobility of the Ishumar, a mobility

that is not determined solely by ‘push-pull factors’ or socio-structural conditions. It is

a decision of the migrants themselves. Transnational mobility for the Ishumar and

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many others on the African continent is not the exception or an undesirable

consequence of sociopolitical phenomena. Instead, it is the rule. Movement

constitutes normality. It is culture, a way of being in the world in which one has

“multiple citizenships, multiple places of residence, and multiple strategies of

moving” (104).

Nadine Sieveking’s article, “Mobility and the Gendered Dynamics of

Migration —Challenging German Development Cooperation in Ghana and Mali,”

similarly addresses conceptual issues behind defining contemporary African mobility

and connects the ways mobility is understood to the discourses surrounding and the

perceptions of, development — which can include economic, social, and political

transformations — and gender norms and relations. Sieveking employs qualitative

research methods to elucidate the heterogeneity of perspectives on migration and the

contradictions between these different perspectives. She works to go beyond the

predominate focus on international migration with policy-oriented debates. Instead,

she analyzes the gendered dimensions of discourse and policy surrounding translocal

and transnational mobility patterns. There is a disproportionate focus on the

economic dimensions of development within policy-related debates and a lack of

focus on the social transformation processes, such as the “aspirations for social

mobility attached to specific spatial mobility strategies and the changing of social

relations through transnational migration” (139).

The dichotomization of internal and external migration in which one studies

them as discrete phenomena is incorrect, for this denies how both flows are

interrelated and “produce a view of a selective reality that cannot account for the

multi-faceted meanings of mobility…” (147). This is made clear when one notes how

there are different mobility patterns of men and women from the same locality, as

well as the notion of “stepwise migration,” which refers to how one can migrate from

a rural area to an urban area. Separately studying internal and external migration

makes sense from a Eurocentric perspective: “Why would the EU be interested in

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investigating migration dynamics as long as the latter are constricted within the

boundaries of the respective African countries or regions?” (146). Internal migration,

particularly from rural to urban areas, is still perceived negatively as a result of the

“poverty driven rural exodus” and “uncontrolled urbanization” (146). Conversely,

international migration is perceived in terms of its economic potential for “financial

remittances,” which can counterbalance “brain drain” (146). This potential affects

local, regional, and international organizations and actors working with the globally

established development discourses espoused by projects, such as the Migration

Information and Management Centre established by the European Commission in

Mali.

Civil society actors and activists have critiqued this economic perspective on

international migration as “migrants should not be assigned the tasks and

responsibilities that belong to the state” (146). Such an argument is a further critique

of the neoliberal consolidation of the state as the responsibility for social welfare

expenditures falls more heavily on non-state actors and civil society organizations.

The differing perceptions of internal and external migration are also gendered in that

internal (female) migration is viewed as a biopolitical problem that can disrupt social

normality — such as breaking up families or contributing to the spread of diseases

(151) —and external or international migration is seen positively as male dominated

with development (economic) potential. In the focus on the ostensible positive effects

of male international migration, one neglects how internal (female) migration can

transform social spaces and produce a “modernization of agriculture, embodied by a

mobile and dynamic rural society,” as well as how “local regulations of mobility can

also result in a drawback of women’s rights and gender equality” (155). The ways in

which different forms of mobility are understood and addressed are connected to

dominant Eurocentric and economic paradigms with international policy debates as

well as the alternative, oppositional, often localized voices of activists and migrants,

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especially women, who are working to change and complicate the concept and

practice of mobility and development.

Giulia Casentini’s article titled “Socio-Cultural and Political Change in a

Transnational Group: The Konkombas (Ghana-Togo)” focuses on the Konkomba

politics and political transition as a medium through which to discuss three central

aspects of postcolonial state-building in West Africa — “the role of traditional

institutions; the relationship between “tradition” [chieftaincy] and “modernity” [the

state], and the role of the international frontier in building identities and giving rise

to political issues” (165). The Konkomba people are settled across the northern area

of the Ghana-Togo border, a border than is quite porous as the Konkomba cross it on

a daily basis for multiple reasons. The border is not only a central tool in regulating

access to citizenship rights, it is also an essential aspect of socio-economic life and a

source of political change. Because the Konkomba have historically not had a

structured chieftaincy, they have not only been seen as stateless or acephalous by

anthropologists and colonial administrators, but they have faced issues in freeing

themselves from political subjection to “chiefly” groups and acquiring recognized

political representation (168). This is partly due to how colonial offers asked the

rulers of chiefly societies, who then claimed to have control over “stateless groups,”

which included the Konkomba, as well as how the external colonial power was

expressed through identifying which groups could provide chiefs, which played an

important role in “constructing identity [and] manipulating concepts of ethnicity.”

Even though the border can be seen as porous on the level of family and economic

activity, it has been used as a political tool to deny the Konkomba’s people

“autochthony” in Ghana by attributing their origins elsewhere. This has fueled the

Konkomba’s continued struggle to be recognized inside of the states in which they

live, whether Ghana or Togo, despite their transnational passages. This illustrates

that the contemporary African state is “clearly perceived as a real entity, not a mere

structure brought by colonization” (174).

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The final article is Michaela Pelican’s “Local Perspectives on Transnational

Relations of Cameroonian Migrants.” It uses the launch point of how international

migration is widely discussed both privately and publically in Cameroon as a way to

explore how the idea of traveling elsewhere to achieve a better way of life has gained

prominence there over the past 15 years. The increased prominence is analogous to

another burgeoning view that Cameroon has little to offer to its “economically,

intellectually, and, arguably, politically aspiring citizens” (178). This burgeoning view

is connected to how structural adjustment programs have contributed to a significant

decrease in government employment and local buying power, as well as an increase

in corrupt and illegal practices in the country’s government (178). The article

presents the findings of three streams of research, which focused on intra-African

migration, migration of Muslim Cameroonians to Arab countries, and Chinese-

African exchange relations. These three research streams work alongside the

researchers hopes to focus on “South-South migration and to contribute to the

theoretical framework of transnational migration by adding an African perspective to

the dominantly Euro-American approach” (181). The researchers make an important

contribution in their focus on the “economic, moral, and spiritual support provided

by relatives and friends [of migrants]” in opposition to the predominate focus on

“remittances and goods sent by migrants” (188).

Concluding Comments

Advances in transportation and communicative technologies have allowed humans to

connect in ways once unimaginable. However, one must not forget that the processes

of globalization are embedded in a complex web of material and ideological power,

violence and domination, and historical legacies of enslavement, colonialism,

imperialism, ethnocentrism, and neoliberal capitalism. Even though the flows of

globalization allow human social and political identities and relationships to form

across boundaries of geopolitics, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, ideology,

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gender, and sexuality, the capitalist task of accumulating the most profit at the lowest

cost and developing a multinational circuit of resource extraction and consumption

are not only deepening inequality between different geopolitical localities, but also

deteriorating the broader biosphere in which we live among other organisms.

One of the principal contradictions of globalization is how many people around

the world have a more limited or compromised right to freely move and travel

throughout the world than objects. Poor migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers,

especially those of African descent, are often excluded from the freedom and benefits

of increased human mobility. Mobility, Transnationalism, and Contemporary

African Societies provides a much-needed critical discussion of the forms and

patterns of migration within and outside of the African continent. This discussion

ventures beyond the traditional conceptualizations of African mobility that are often

grounded in a Eurocentric, economic paradigm by focusing on non-linear migrations,

changing gender roles, shifts in individual motivations, and the relationships

between historical sociopolitical and economic factors and contemporary migratory

patterns.

Importantly acknowledged is the agency of migrants and the role mobilities

play in empowerment and self-efficacy, a means of exercising control over one’s life

and working to ameliorate negative socioeconomic conditions. Migration is at once

deeply existential and practical. Movement across space generates new ideas and

ways of being in the world, new ways of redistributing resources, while opening

pathways and geographies that are not bounded to the state, but yet do not wholly

transcend the state, operating in an unforeseen modality that cannot be limited to

just ‘here’ or ‘there.’